Azure News 2017 – Week 43

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New Fv2 VMs (fastest in the public cloud), Cray Supercomputers and Azure Container Service (AKS) on the latest Need to Know podcast episode 168.

Fv2 VMs are now available, the fastest VMs on Azure

The new Fv2 VM family in Azure now generally available offers the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor (code-named Skylake), the fastest Skylake CPU in the public cloud today. The closest cloud competitor offering Skylake currently only offers 2.0 GHz.

These VM sizes are hyper-threaded and run on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8168 processor, featuring a base core frequency of 2.7 GHz and a maximum single-core turbo frequency of 3.7 GHz.

With Hyper-Threading is enabled, the quantity of logical processors will be double to that of the physical cores. Each vCPU executes on a logical processor.

The Fv2 VMs will be available in 7 sizes, with the largest size featuring 72 vCPUs and 144 GiB of RAM. These sizes will support Azure premium storage disks by default and will also support accelerated networking capabilities for the highest throughput of any cloud and ultra-low VM to VM latencies.

Available in West US 2, West Europe, and East US. Southeast Asia is coming soon.

Cray Supercomputers are coming to Azure

An exclusive partnership with Cray that will provide our customers unprecedented access to supercomputing capabilities in Azure to solve the toughest challenges in in massive compute workloads for example climate modeling, precision medicine, energy, manufacturing, and other scientific research.

This will help you to harness the power of HPC and AI in an agile and cost-effective way.

Microsoft and Cray are working together to bring customers the right combination of extreme performance, scalability, and elasticity. You can get dedicated Cray XC or CS series supercomputers in Azure.

Azure Container Service (AKS)

an open-source platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts

Provides the most options and flexibility.

Can fully manage the underlying cloud infrastructure and natively integrates with Azure resources.

Can scale up the number of containers in a cluster and also add virtual machines to the agent pool

Manages exposure to the outside world using the Azure Load balancer while deploying a container i.e. changes its own infrastructure to accommodate workloads. For instance, it can make changes to the load balancer while deploying a container that hosts a web server.

the most complex container cluster product compared to DC/OS and Docker Swarm

With AKS (managed Kubernetes service), you get the benefit of open source Kubernetes without complexity and operational overhead.

AKS is free. Unlike other cloud providers who charge an hourly rate for the management infrastructure, with AKS you will pay nothing for the management of your Kubernetes cluster, pay only for what you consume.

In addition to the launch of AKS, Microsoft have announced the general availability of managed SKUs Azure Container Registry (ACR) and the the preview of ACR geo-replication.